Best Alternatives to Microsoft Visio for Mac

Microsoft Visio is an incredible tool to create wide variety of office documents and presentations for all kinds of projects. Visio is used extensively by the business professionals for designing vector graphics and diagrams. The features and functionalities this tool offers has made it one of the most preferred choices among the professionals.

Why the need for Microsoft Visio Alternatives?

A lot of Mac users also wish to use this tool to enhance the quality of their documents. Unfortunately, there is no way to use this Microsoft office product on the OSX computers. Even if you have the MS Office Suite installed on your Mac, Visio is not the part of it.

So, what are the options for those who wish to use Visio on Mac? Well, they will need to use one of the available alternatives. Thankfully, there are many effective Visio alternatives available. Here is a quick rundown of the top 5.

#1 Lucid Chart

Lucid Chart is one of the best alternatives to Microsoft Vision for a number of reasons. For starters, it is free application with a number of useful features. The other great thing about Lucid Chart is that it is a web based application. This means that you do not need to install it on your computer.

The web user interface of this application is extremely user friendly. It incorporates the drag and drop feature to help you draw different types of diagrams and graphics for various purposes. It also offers multi-user functionality letting you create the documents in collaboration with others. A small team can easily work together and come up with stunning designs.

What’s more incredible is the fact that you can easily import and export the Micrsoft Visio files too. So, even if you are using the Mac computer, you can edit, modify, or build upon the Visio vdx format.

#2 LibreOffice Draw

LibreOffice is an open-source program that gives a tough competition to Microsoft Visio. This software offers just about every feature you could expect in Visio. You could use this tool to create wide variety of diagrams, drawings, and charts.

Grouping is one of the most amazing features offered by LibreOffice Draw. This feature, as the name suggests, lets you easily group a number of different elements and objects together. Once they are grouped you can perform a number of tasks on all of them at the same time, such as connecting, moving, expanding and more.

By default this program saves your projects in the XML format. However, the diagrams can also be converted to the SWF Flash format.

#3 Dia

Dia is also a very effective drawing software program very similar in terms of features and functionalities to Microsoft Visio. In fact, it seems that the developers have designed this application in the likeness of Visio. The user interface of Dia bears striking resemblance to MS Visio. The features are also quite the same.

#4 Ardoq

Ardoz isn’t exactly a very popular alternative to Visio. However, it does come packed with a number of top-class features that can give Microsoft Visio the run for its money. Ardoq is perfect for a number of professionals including process owners, developers, architects, business owners, and project managers. No matter how intricate and complex the information may seem, this application can translate it into beautiful and more meaningful diagrams.

Ardoq also offers quite reliable templates for visual modelling. Whether you need to create process flows, relationship diagrams, or sequence diagrams, you can do all of them easily with this tool. If the existing templates do not meet your purpose, this application has a number of plugin editors to offer. So, if you are looking for free Visio alternative, then Ardoz might be a better option.

#5 Createl

If you are looking for an alternative more intuitive and effective than Microsoft Visio, yet more cost-effective, Creately software is what you should be looking at.

Featuring a number of symbols and diagram templates, Creately has become the preferred choice of the professionals who wish to create effective diagrams and graphs for a range of purposes. Creately offers a number of features including revision history, vast project libraries, Google image search integration, and a lot more.